In SABR’s Baseball at Manzanar: How We Played the Game, 1942-1945, you won’t find names of legendary American baseball heroes like Mickey Mantle or Ken Griffey Jr. — but you will most definitely find American heroes. People such as Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi, Pete Mitsui, George Tamura, Jim Morita, and Mary Matsuno Miya didn’t just excel at playing ball. They excelled at perseverance, after having their lives taken away from them to be detained at the Manzanar War Relocation Center during World War II.
On February 19, 1942, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, granting the secretary of war and his commanders the power to “prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The order was quickly applied to the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast who were then told to sell their possessions and vacate their homes. They were relocated to 10 remote, military-style incarceration camps.
One such camp was the Manzanar War Relocation Center, located near Lone Pine, California, where the summers were hot and dusty. Though they were surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, and felt betrayed by their government, these incarcerated Japanese Americans maintained their American traditions, holding celebrations for Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, and playing baseball. In addition to establishing schools and a camp newspaper for themselves during their desert captivity, within a month of their arrival in Manzanar the incarcerees had built a baseball diamond. Soon the desert was dotted with baseball and softball diamonds, with the camp at one point fielding more than 100 teams. Baseball remained a vital part of life until the camp was closed in 1945.
This SABR Digital Library book and Featured Spotlight companion website tell the story of baseball at Manzanar and the life stories of many individuals who, after being given $25 on their release, went on to rebuild their lives. This project is illustrated with many historical photos, some taken by Toyo Miyatake, an incarceree who snuck a forbidden lens into the camp and built his own camera, and some by famed photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange.
Contributors include over a dozen members of the Society for American Baseball Research and several other key individuals such as Dan Kwong, the son of an incarceree and leader of the effort to restore the baseball field at the Manzanar National Historic Site, and Kerry Yo Nakagawa, founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project. This team has joined forces to tell the story of how the Japanese Americans incarcerated at Manzanar played the game.
On these pages, you’ll find essays and stories, rare photos, and interviews with survivors of the camp and their families in their own words, plus special coverage of the reconstruction and reclamation of the Manzanar baseball field leading up to a historic doubleheader played there in 2024 and the ballfield’s Grand Opening event in 2026.
— Russ Speiller and James Forr
September 2026
